Tag Archives: Ads

What if a friend on twitter (some you know well either in real life, or just online) told you where to get personalized m&ms and included a link? Would you click it? Do you ever click a shortened link, not knowing where it will end up?

According to an article from the New York Times Tweets are the next billboards for rent. There are several start ups that are looking for Tweeters to hand over their feed for a quick ad. They’re hoping to use celebrities with thousands of followers, but also regular tweeters too. These tweeters get paid, but the start-ups take a cut. Some companies differentiate between celebrities and Joe schmoes, while others just take a 30% cut across the board. A sample tweet would be marked as sponsored, which would let followers know its was an ad. The article mentions that three years ago, a similar trend started with blogs, but the posts were not clearly marked as ads so a lot of people were against the idea.

Even though the tweets are clearly marked as adds, some people are against the idea, because the ads would spoil the “authentic dialogue” on Twitter. But I think sometimes the only difference between an ad and a hearty recommendation is the label. We all tweet recommendations – I usually tweet about the podcasts I listen to. While I’m not against the idea of tweeting ads (and even would consider looking into signing up if I needed the money) I know I would not purposely click on a link from someone I know if I knew it was an ad beforehand.